O'Brien pleased, but Penn State recruiting class not highly rated

IT APPEARS that Bill O'Brien has at least one thing in common with his predecessor as Penn State's head football coach.

The late Joe Paterno never paid much attention to the assessments of so-called recruiting experts, preferring to trust what he and his coaches saw in a particular player. Frequently, Paterno admitted, he and his staff had to look hard to see the true potential of a 17- or 18-year-old kid who some analyst had dismissed as a two-star project likely destined to be a career backup.

"You got a guy sitting in a television studio saying he likes the way this or that player moves his hips or something like that," JoePa always would say, dismissively, after the outsiders issued their grades on national signing day. "It's ridiculous."

After Penn State signed 19 players yesterday, a group that especially did not wow the analysts whom Paterno held in contempt, O'Brien professed to be pleased with the Class of 2012, which ESPNU rated only 46th nationally and seventh among the 12 Big Ten Conference schools.

"I think it went really well," O'Brien, who, for the rest of this week is still the New England Patriots' offensive coordinator, told Penn State beat writers via teleconference from Indianapolis, where the Pats are getting ready to play the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLVI.

But what of the analysts' lowest ranking for a Penn State recruiting class in years?

"I'm not even sure who does those rankings," O'Brien said. "I just know I'm part of a football team, the New England Patriots, that if you went up and down our roster, you'd find guys that were highly ranked coming out of high school and some guys that were not ranked at all.

"All I care about is our staff and our players, and what they think about guys coming in to help us win games. That to me is the most important thing. And there's no question you can develop young players. There's a chance for guys to get better every day. We've developed young players in the NFL."

Time will tell. O'Brien said it takes at least 2 years to make any reasonable judgment of a recruiting class, so maybe this bunch of mostly three- and two-star prospects will seem better than advertised after O'Brien and his staff get a chance to, as they say, coach 'em up. But even if few standouts emerge, the true test of the O'Brien coaching staff will come a year from now, when they've had time to settle in.